FullStack 2016 Day 1

As some of you might already know, FullStack 2016 was recently concluded in London and was a full packed house this time with the tickets being sold out about a week in advance. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the event as a speaker and was talking about PolymerJS. But more than the speaking opportunity, what got me excited was the chance to be brushing shoulders with some really awesome people, who have been industry experts and have been shaping the community thus far!

We landed in London on 12th July, 2016 morning and first up was the introductory speakers dinner in the evening. Being on the speaking panel does have its advantages! Every one in the crowd was bursting with energy and enthusiastic about sharing and gaining knowledge at this big stage. I got a chance to interact with some renowned contributors of some of the most widely used technologies such as Dylan Schiemann (board member of jQuery foundation), Chris Heilmann and Mark Rendle!

Day 1 started with Chris Heilmann’s mesmerizing keynote on Progressing JavaScript and Apps the Web way . He briefly described how our native apps don’t go well with open source technologies with the given hardware and network performance. Latest changes in the market and a new set of web technologies allows us now to slim down and deliver experiences for our users native environments can not match. The concept of progressive webapps is overtaking the market and we can be part of this change to provide our users seamless experience.

After that there were five parallel tracks running out of which we attended a few:

Building React Components Library

From callback to promises and beyond

An introduction to Service Worker

Have I Got Nodes For You!

Reconstructing the web with Polymer (this was taken by me! )

Robert Haritonov (Building React Components Library) shared his experience how React has helped their company to create reusable component which they could easily share with their peers and made it well documented using tools availed by React community to make components actually reusable. He guided through the key patterns of building React components library with proper navigation, rendered components sandbox and API description.

After a break, Vincenzo Chianese gave his talk on From callback to promises and beyond . He came up with the refreshing approach of using Promises, Cogenerators and new async/await keywords for managing asynchronous code instead of callbacks which leaves us into unmanageable stacks of function calls. These concepts actually helps us improving readability , scalability of code with minimum development time.

After that I presented my talk on Reconstructing the web with Polymer. Room was full with people who were already working with Web Components / Polymer JS and some of them were present out of curiosity how this Web Component approach is everywhere in development. Talk was mostly focused on how web components are a new way out of current front-end development headaches and how Polymer project started by Google team has supported this new approach. There were many questions around how this is different, does PolymerJS play the role of a middle-man, how they can you get started with Polymer JS etc. I guess the session was very interactive to say the least!

Phil Nash presented how Service workers are the biggest hit on browser since XMLHttpRequest . Further Phil explained how service workers helping out developer community to deliver better application and user experience even if user is facing flickery network. Service worker plays a vital role in the whole idea of progressive webapps. Everyone was dazzled to see we can serve seamless application updates, user’s requests, push notifications with minimum lines of code, even when user is actually not connected to network.

Finally our long day ended with yummy bites of pizzas, beer and an unforgettable comedy quiz show about software, programming, the Internet and technologies hosted by Mark Rendle, Dylan Beattie and their guests as “Have I Got Nodes For You!”. But hey! The conference was supposed to go on for 2 more days and guess who was beginning the next day with his keynote – Todd Motto! Keep watching this space for more updates from Day 2 of the conference.

Komal is a senior software developer at TTN Digital based in India. She has been a part of fast-paced teams involved in delivering customised solutions around the world. She has considerable experience on NodeJS, AngularJS, Polymer, Java, Groovy, MongoDB etc